Michelle, thank you for this. Yes. I've seen the same in my own work with AI. The LLMs read intensity and inner conflict as distress to be managed, and I push back on the interpretations regularly. The guardrails are calibrated to the very 'normal' this post critiques.
Extremely thoughtful and nuanced article, thank you for this.
What strikes me most here is the distinction between “feeling better” and becoming more structurally aligned with what someone sees.
The hardest part of some developmental crises is not always the suffering itself, but the moment when previously transparent tensions stop being invisible. And once that happens, returning to old interpretations can become almost impossible.
I appreciate the nuance that multilevel processes and chaos can coexist. You can be reflective, growth-oriented and value driven while struggling to regulate or function within environments that reward fragmentation and non-awareness.
Sometimes the crisis is not pathology in the classical sense, but the cost of no longer being able to unknow what has already become visible.
Ewelina, thank you for this. "The cost of no longer being able to unknow what has already become visible" is so real. That irreversibility is what the classical pathology frame misses. You can't grieve your way back into not seeing what you've already seen.
I love the way you describe the resonance between Fromm and Dabrowski and its relevance to our everyday lives. The three questions worth asking you posited are truly clarifying and useful. I’m interested also in your perspective on how you see the broader cultural consequences playing out of what they critiqued.
Thank you so much, Richard. This is a great question. I tried to speak to the broader cultural consequences in a post last summer called Disintegration as a Path to Meaning. It applies the unilevel/multilevel distinction at the societal level. I’m curious what connections you see in all of this.
I’m going to give this some thought and work on another piece soon.
Genuinely fascinating. I had not heard of Dabrowski, which is perhaps a failure of my training as a therapist. I'm certainly well aware of the tendency of modern therapeutic practice to define "mental health" as adaptation to social norms, and the dangers of that when the norms themselves are sick. The definition of father-daughter incest as actually beneficial to the child in the mid-20th century being just one of many examples.
It's clear that society's sickness is the major issue. And that the "canaries in the coal mine," those who are most sensitive to the world around us and reflect that sickness most intensely in our own minds, bodies, and spirits, are the first to suffer. And that this is not pathology. It's integrity.
And yet, I wonder how we, as mental health professionals, can truly help?
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, Chris. It seems like you're a deep thinker, with some deep knowledge and reading. I'd truly welcome your input about what we can do, as a field, to help people better. It's a question I sit with every day.
Thank you for much for reading and sharing this thoughtful response. 🙏
What you’re naming about adaptation to sick norms is the heart of it. Dąbrowski’s framework refuses the equation of mental health with adjustment, and treats certain kinds of suffering as developmental rather than pathological.
That you haven’t come across Dąbrowski isn’t a failure of your training. His work has been largely contained within gifted education for decades.
I’m not practicing as a clinician myself, so I don’t have advice for the inside of that work. What I’m doing on Substack and in the podcasts is part of what I think can help, which is getting this theory into circulation so people have language for what they’re experiencing, and so the clinicians who want it can find it.
I’ll take a look at your piece when I get a chance. Thank you again!
And further to my previous comment but much harder to voice. My mother told me when I was a teenager that she thought I was possessed by the devil and needed excorcising. She wasn't religious. She just saw my drink/drugs/rebellious behaviour this way. At the same time I was exploring different churches in search of belonging.
Maybe points in the direction of positive disintegration methinks.
Davina, thank you for sharing this. This points directly toward positive disintegration. The simultaneous rebellion AND search for belonging is exactly the structure: surface behavior that read as pathology, while underneath you were doing the developmental work of looking for where you fit. Your mother used the framework she had. I’m sorry it took the form it did.
This ties with my experience. And I absolutely agree that the ones who struggle visibly are often the ones most alive to what's wrong and that silencing those symptoms can be the most dangerous thing we do.
I think about Greta Thunberg, whose intense response to climate change was initially treated as pathology. She stopped eating, stopped talking. Her teachers were very concerned about her. Her mother described her as, "slowly disappearing into some form of darkness."
Her behaviour could so easily have been seen as obsessive. But it was a profound moral response to something most of the rest of us had learned not to see.
Ref: Greta's mother Malena Ernman's book, Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis (Penguin, 2020).
Thank you, Davina! Yes, Greta is an excellent example of positive maladjustment. And your point about silencing being the most dangerous thing we do is the heart of it. If her family had managed to “treat” her into compliance, the climate movement would have lost one of its most important voices. The symptoms were the early form of the work.
Thank you for this. “The first refusal to keep adapting to a false map” is the line that does the work. That's the developmental moment positive maladjustment names. The system reads the refusal as malfunction. The refusal is the system's intelligence registering accurately. The same architecture shows up across domains (clinical, educational, organizational) wherever institutional health requires the suppression of accurate perception.
I would like to add that the guardrails on AI are built for the “norm” and will push you away from what is signaled as distress in any form.
Michelle, thank you for this. Yes. I've seen the same in my own work with AI. The LLMs read intensity and inner conflict as distress to be managed, and I push back on the interpretations regularly. The guardrails are calibrated to the very 'normal' this post critiques.
Extremely thoughtful and nuanced article, thank you for this.
What strikes me most here is the distinction between “feeling better” and becoming more structurally aligned with what someone sees.
The hardest part of some developmental crises is not always the suffering itself, but the moment when previously transparent tensions stop being invisible. And once that happens, returning to old interpretations can become almost impossible.
I appreciate the nuance that multilevel processes and chaos can coexist. You can be reflective, growth-oriented and value driven while struggling to regulate or function within environments that reward fragmentation and non-awareness.
Sometimes the crisis is not pathology in the classical sense, but the cost of no longer being able to unknow what has already become visible.
Ewelina, thank you for this. "The cost of no longer being able to unknow what has already become visible" is so real. That irreversibility is what the classical pathology frame misses. You can't grieve your way back into not seeing what you've already seen.
You can’t unknow it once the structure becomes visible. That irreversibility changes everything.
I love the way you describe the resonance between Fromm and Dabrowski and its relevance to our everyday lives. The three questions worth asking you posited are truly clarifying and useful. I’m interested also in your perspective on how you see the broader cultural consequences playing out of what they critiqued.
Thank you so much, Richard. This is a great question. I tried to speak to the broader cultural consequences in a post last summer called Disintegration as a Path to Meaning. It applies the unilevel/multilevel distinction at the societal level. I’m curious what connections you see in all of this.
I’m going to give this some thought and work on another piece soon.
https://www.positivedisintegration.org/p/disintegration-as-a-path-to-meaning?r=2xu6y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Genuinely fascinating. I had not heard of Dabrowski, which is perhaps a failure of my training as a therapist. I'm certainly well aware of the tendency of modern therapeutic practice to define "mental health" as adaptation to social norms, and the dangers of that when the norms themselves are sick. The definition of father-daughter incest as actually beneficial to the child in the mid-20th century being just one of many examples.
It's clear that society's sickness is the major issue. And that the "canaries in the coal mine," those who are most sensitive to the world around us and reflect that sickness most intensely in our own minds, bodies, and spirits, are the first to suffer. And that this is not pathology. It's integrity.
And yet, I wonder how we, as mental health professionals, can truly help?
I sat with some similar questions, from a slightly different angle, in a recent post: https://substack.com/@thrivingfamilytherapy/note/c-271848620?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=332qag
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, Chris. It seems like you're a deep thinker, with some deep knowledge and reading. I'd truly welcome your input about what we can do, as a field, to help people better. It's a question I sit with every day.
Thank you for much for reading and sharing this thoughtful response. 🙏
What you’re naming about adaptation to sick norms is the heart of it. Dąbrowski’s framework refuses the equation of mental health with adjustment, and treats certain kinds of suffering as developmental rather than pathological.
That you haven’t come across Dąbrowski isn’t a failure of your training. His work has been largely contained within gifted education for decades.
I’m not practicing as a clinician myself, so I don’t have advice for the inside of that work. What I’m doing on Substack and in the podcasts is part of what I think can help, which is getting this theory into circulation so people have language for what they’re experiencing, and so the clinicians who want it can find it.
I’ll take a look at your piece when I get a chance. Thank you again!
And further to my previous comment but much harder to voice. My mother told me when I was a teenager that she thought I was possessed by the devil and needed excorcising. She wasn't religious. She just saw my drink/drugs/rebellious behaviour this way. At the same time I was exploring different churches in search of belonging.
Maybe points in the direction of positive disintegration methinks.
Davina, thank you for sharing this. This points directly toward positive disintegration. The simultaneous rebellion AND search for belonging is exactly the structure: surface behavior that read as pathology, while underneath you were doing the developmental work of looking for where you fit. Your mother used the framework she had. I’m sorry it took the form it did.
This ties with my experience. And I absolutely agree that the ones who struggle visibly are often the ones most alive to what's wrong and that silencing those symptoms can be the most dangerous thing we do.
I think about Greta Thunberg, whose intense response to climate change was initially treated as pathology. She stopped eating, stopped talking. Her teachers were very concerned about her. Her mother described her as, "slowly disappearing into some form of darkness."
Her behaviour could so easily have been seen as obsessive. But it was a profound moral response to something most of the rest of us had learned not to see.
Ref: Greta's mother Malena Ernman's book, Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis (Penguin, 2020).
Thank you, Davina! Yes, Greta is an excellent example of positive maladjustment. And your point about silencing being the most dangerous thing we do is the heart of it. If her family had managed to “treat” her into compliance, the climate movement would have lost one of its most important voices. The symptoms were the early form of the work.
Thank you for this. “The first refusal to keep adapting to a false map” is the line that does the work. That's the developmental moment positive maladjustment names. The system reads the refusal as malfunction. The refusal is the system's intelligence registering accurately. The same architecture shows up across domains (clinical, educational, organizational) wherever institutional health requires the suppression of accurate perception.